Human Rights Glance
Weeks after the Civil War's guns fell silent and barely two months after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas. They had come to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, an order freeing enslaved people in seceded Confederate states. And the date they arrived — June 19, 1865 — is now remembered as the first "Juneteenth."
The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued years earlier during the war, on Jan. 1, 1863. It's the version most commonly emphasized in history books: the executive order that Lincoln himself reportedly said was "the great event of the nineteenth century" and his lasting legacy.
But word of such an order had already been circulating throughout the South for months. A preliminary proclamation, which contained much the same wording as the historic order, was issued on Sept. 22, 1862, days after the Battle of Antietam — the single bloodiest day in American military history. The purpose of it was to "warn that if the Confederate states don't return to the Union by January 1st, [Lincoln] will in fact issue a final proclamation," according to Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian.
Not all enslaved people immediately knew about Lincoln's orders, but many learned of it while the fighting was still raging. Rumors spread through informal networks, sometimes inadvertently from slaveholders themselves, says Holzer, who directs the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York.
Slaveholders would often discuss the proclamation right in front of the people they enslaved, he says. They wrongly assumed that since enslaved people were prohibited from reading and writing, they would be oblivious to discussion of events around them.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem has denounced the “unlawful and illegitimate” Israeli seizure of its property in occupied East Jerusalem.
Republican governor Mike DeWine, the who co-wrote the bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty more than 45 years ago, has called for the state to abolish capital punishment, saying it did not improve public safety and could no longer be morally justified.
On Sunday, Israeli settlers torched vehicles and attempted to set fire to a mosque in the West Bank, prompting The Israeli military to deploy troops to quell riots described as violent acts by "Israeli civilians."
The EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has privately compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid-era South Africa, exposing a sharp contrast between her closed-door remarks and her public support for Israel.
Nearly 100 British MPs and peers have signed a letter calling for an upcoming London event advertising the sale of land in illegal Israeli settlements to be cancelled, warning that it could implicate the UK in international war crimes. 
A 20-year-old Palestinian American woman has been held in Israeli military detention for nearly two weeks after Israeli soldiers stormed her family home in a pre-dawn raid on 2 June.
